Annie Proulx’s latest work is a strange hybrid. It is more a series of short stories than a novel; and though it is immensely readable, fusing sentiment and bleakness with Proulx’s customary wit and irresistible relish for the quirky, some may find the whole ensemble less than a fully fledged work of fiction. The Shipping
I saw the first tourists arriving in Afghanistan this summer. I saw their incredulity at the graveyard of crumpled aeroplanes at Kabul airport and at the Hazara suburb of the city that looks like Berlin in 1945. The question everyone asked was: how did this happen? How did a country famous for its hospitality and
Photographs by Mark J. Rattenbury Further details are available on the archive website, www.somerset.gov.uk/archives/exmoor This is a puzzlingly titled book. Are we being encouraged to look on the contents as mirrored reflections of a way of life, or reflections on the death of the old Exmoor? Perhaps we, like the Lady of Shalott, are supposed
What to do if you plan a book whose essence is a single parachute drop? And what to do if, apparently, that particular parachutist was not deeply committed to the book? Similarly, if your two previous books have been Soup and Mushroom, and if your career has involved theology, minicab-driving, obituary writing, and founding a
This highly readable selection of obituaries is based on the original more general collections of Hugh Massingberd. His object was to celebrate life rather than death; and indeed the persons here described, though from a specialised category, come vividly alive in the capable hands of Canon Trevor Beeson. The period covered is the quarter century
The picture of a maverick which emerges from this book is ever more strongly drawn. In this sequel to his auto- biographical No Voice from the Hall, published in 1998, John Harris takes us forwards, backwards and sideways around his earlier account. There is less fishing, and the kindly figure of ‘Snozzle’, his Uncle Sid,
Quentin Crisp was, among other delightful things, a human paradox. He loathed the Gay Liberation Movement as bitterly as he despised Oscar Wilde, yet he did more than anyone else to change people’s attitudes towards homosexuality. He was unashamedly flamboyant, yet spinsterish and celibate; the sex act, he explained, was like ‘undergoing a colostomy operation
The fine, rusty-gold building of the University Press presides over Walton Street in Oxford with its more monumental than collegiate presence. The touchstone of literacy in homes all over the world will be an Oxford dictionary, compact, shorter or the full, distinguished thing. The livery of the press is recognisable everywhere, ultramarine and gold. Reliably
‘We might go straight into lunch
The following extracts are taken from George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book Zeuxis was said to have painted grapes on a boy’s head so well that the birds came and pecked them. Sir G. Kneller said that if the boy too had been well painted the birds wouldn’t have dared approach.An accurate daguerrotype portrait of a commonplace
A consolation of being an international foot-in-the-door man in the 1970s, albeit one selling Monets and Moores, not Hoovers, was arriving from JFK at the Hotel Carlyle in Manhattan. You reached the superlative place at about 10 in the evening, and even though flesh complained that it was the middle of the night, spirit insisted
This year my village school, like hundreds of others, is scrimping and saving to afford that Holy Grail of modern education – the Computer Suite. Of course computers are an essential part of every child’s world, and will presumably be even more so in the future. Yet there is something rather soulless about the rows
It was only when David Attenborough’s autobiography arrived for review that I realised I had been dodging his television programmes for years. Nothing personal; it was just that a pigeon on the pavement is more interesting to me than a bird of paradise on a television screen, a peep-show, that seems to push me further
Next time you’re stuck for conversation at a dinner party, why not use one of these fascinating facts to break the ice? 1. In mammalian terms the male of Homo sapiens is spectacularly endowed – his penis, when erect, being roughly three times larger than a 400lb gorilla’s. 2. In Pharaonic Egypt, Egyptian men were
The sort of young person who once drifted into publishing now fiddles about with computers instead. The trade has been transformed both by its wretched economics and by the wretched spirit of the times. Solo publishing in particular, an eccentric business or a business for eccentrics, should have died out many years ago. Michael Russell
Professor Roger Louis’s own expertise is in British imperial history; he edited the three-volume Oxford History of the British Empire. For years past, he has run seminars at the Harry Ransome Humanities Research Center at Austin, Texas, which holds ample stores of British literary and historical manuscripts; he invites leading dons and critics from Great
My heart is always lifted when a book begins with a map; it is like getting on a plane, we are about to go on an adventure. The first image in this generously illustrated work is a map of Italy 400 years ago; it shows a loose collection of independent nation states which, at that
As Schindler’s Ark shows, Thomas Keneally is at his best bringing the past to life undaunted either by the importance of the events or by the famous names at the centre of them. Two of his other novels that lie to hand, A Family Madness and Gossip from the Forest, confirm that he wastes no
The publication of this volume marks the completion of Joseph Frank’s enormous biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky, a work which he has spent half a lifetime in writing. ‘Monumental’ is the standard clichZ for such an enterprise, and Frank’s is certainly that. The scale of the work is due mainly to the fact that it sets
In ‘The Sussex Vampires’, Watson takes down from the shelf the great index volume for V; Holmes balances it on his knee and reads: Voyage of the Gloria Scott. Victor Lynch, the forger. Venomous lizard or gila … Vittoria, the circus belle. Vanderbilt and the Yeggman … Vipers. Vigor, the Hammersmith wonder… And then he